MEDICAL EDUCATION

“The half-life of knowledge in highly specialized clinical arenas cannot endure a shelf life of more than three years, at which point a clinician can become useless at best and dangerous at worst.” (1)

“The medical school curriculum and its entrance requirements are geared to the highly academic student who is headed for research. In the increasingly desperate struggle for admission, these academically talented students are crowding out those who want to practice medicine.” (2)

It has come to pass that the teaching staffs of all our medical schools are a very special breed. In the selection and training process, heavy emphasis always has been put on finding individuals who, because of temperament or special interest, have been attracted by the field of research, and especially by research in pharmacology. This has resulted in loading the staffs of our medical schools with men and women who, by preference and by training, are ideal propagators of the drug-oriented science that has come to dominate Western medicine.

The irony of it is that neither they nor their students are even remotely aware that they are products of a rigid selection process geared to hidden commercial objectives. So thorough is their insulation from this fact that, even when exposed to the obvious truth, very few are capable of accepting it, for to do so would be a tremendous blow to their professional pride and ego. Generally speaking, the deeper one is drawn into the medical profession, the more years he has been exposed to its regimens, the more difficult it is to break out of its confines.

Dr. David L. Edsall was the Dean of the Harvard Medical School. The conditions he describes at Harvard are the same as those at every other medical school in America:

“I was, for a period, a professor of therapeutics and pharmacology, and I knew from experience that students were obliged then by me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many of which were valueless, many of them useless, some probably, even harmful . . . Almost all subjects must be taken at exactly the same time, and in almost exactly in the same way by all students, and the amount introduced into each course is such that few students have time or energy to explore any subject in a spirit of independent interest. A little comparison shows that there is less intellectual freedom in the medical course than in almost any other form of professional education in this country.” (3)

Yes, he who pays the piper does call the tune. It may not be humanly possible for those who finance the medical schools to determine what is taught in every minute detail. But such is not necessary to achieve the desired goals. One can be sure, however, that there is total control over what is not taught, and that, under no circumstances will even one of the National Cancer Institute’s grants ever go to a medical college, to a hospital, to a teaching staff, or to a researcher that holds the unorthodox view that the best medicine is in nature.

Because of its generous patrons, orthodox medicine will always fiddle a tune of man-made drugs. Whatever basic nutrition may be allowed into the melody will be minimal at best, and it will be played over and over again that natural sources of vitamins are in no way superior to those that are man-made or synthesized. The day when orthodox medicine finally embraces the field of nutrition will be the day when the pharmaceutical cartel behind it also has monopolized the vitamin and food product industry essential to it – not one day before.

In the meantime, while doctors are forced to spend hundreds of hours studying the names and actions of all kinds of man-made drugs, they are lucky if they receive even a portion of a single course on basic nutrition. Many have none at all. The result is that the average patient knows more about practical nutrition than their doctor.

Even at a top tier University like Harvard, of their 8,900 professors and lecturers, 1,600 admit that either they or a family member have had some kind of business link to drug companies — sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — that could bias their teaching or research. Additionally, pharma contributed more than $11.5 million to the school last year for research and continuing-education classes. (4)